On January 28, 2026, in Zhytomyr, a traveling exhibition “Journey with the ‘Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter’: From Antiquity to 1939” opened at the regional literary museum. The exhibition immediately sets a broad historical scale — from early contacts to the dramatic threshold of World War II — and offers a look at the past without simplifications and myths.
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The exhibition consists of 20 informational panels and already has a long international biography. As the head of the Ukrainian representation of the Canadian non-governmental organization Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter Vladyslav Hrynevych explained, the project was first presented in 2015 in five major cities of Canada. After adaptation and translation into Ukrainian, the exhibition began actively traveling around Ukraine.
Over the years, the exhibition has visited 15 cities in the country — in regional centers, museums, libraries, cultural and educational spaces. Each time it gathers a different audience, but invariably evokes the same interest: an attempt to understand not only the tragedies but also the complex intertwining of the destinies of the two peoples.
According to Vladyslav Hrynevych, the key goal of the project is to deepen mutual understanding between Ukrainians and Jews and to show how close their historical and cultural dialogue was.
He emphasizes: it is not only about tragic pages. The exhibition tells about mixed marriages, the linguistic mutual influence of the Ukrainian language and Yiddish, religious contacts, and how these processes formed new identities. The phenomenon of the “Ukrainian Jew,” he says, was almost unrecognized until recently, but today it is becoming an increasingly noticeable and discussed part of common history.
The organizers place a special emphasis on the educational mission. The head of the department of culture and tourism of the regional military administration, Tetyana Rudenka, notes that the exhibition is especially important for schoolchildren and students.
According to her, the museum and cultural institutions plan to hold lectures here for children and youth so that the conversation about the Holocaust and the history of Jews in Ukraine is not limited to one date on the calendar. Video lectures are also planned to be posted on the official resources of the department of culture.
For many visitors, the exhibition resonates particularly sharply in the context of today’s war. One of them, Vadym Pyvovarov, noted that parallels with modernity suggest themselves.
He believes that Russia’s actions against the Ukrainian people in terms of scale and logic of violence evoke painful associations with what Nazi Germany did to the Jews in the 20th century. These comparisons, he says, make the historical exhibition not archival but frighteningly relevant.
It is in this context that the theme of the common Ukrainian-Jewish history acquires a special meaning — as a reminder of what dehumanization leads to and why memory remains a matter of security, not just culture. It is no coincidence that in the middle of the exhibition route, the organizers emphasize the contemporary resonance of the project, linking it with the values regularly written about by NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency, discussing the connections between Ukraine, Israel, and the shared responsibility before history.
The exhibition at the Zhytomyr Regional Literary Museum will run until February 15, 2026.